Dec 19, 2013 | Foreign Affairs, International, Profile
Developed by Katie Brown and Mark Tessler
If you ask Mark Tessler about the trajectory of his work, he smiles. His career path was never planned; rather he took advantage of unexpected opportunities along the way. Among these was the chance to spend part of his undergraduate education as a student at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and part of his graduate education as a student at the University of Tunis.
Since completing his studies, Tessler has conducted research in Tunisia, Morocco, Israel, the West Bank, and Egypt. He has also lived and taught university in several Sub-Saharan African countries.
Not surprisingly, one of Tessler’s areas of research is the Israel-Palestine conflict. Spending time in both Israel and Palestine has enabled him to witness first-hand the legitimate aspirations of both sides and has shaped his perspective on the conflict. He has published extensively on the subject. His scholarship, which emphasizes rigor as well as political and cultural sensitivity, includes articles in World Politics, the Journal of Conflict Resolution, International Studies Quarterly, and a prize-winning 1000-page book, A History of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict. Tessler describes his approach to the conflict as “objectivity without detachment.”
Tessler’s broader research questions focus on the individual-level of analysis and investigate the normative and behavioral orientations of ordinary citizens in the Middle East and North Africa. In particular, he studies how people sort out who they are, what kind of society they want to live in, and by what kind of political system they want to be governed. Some of the findings from this research are brought together in his 2011 book, Public Opinion in the Middle East: Survey Research and the Political Orientations of Ordinary Citizens.
Currently, Tessler is working on a new and original public opinion database. With support from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the database pulls together data from 44 nationally-representative surveys conducted in 15 countries in the Middle East and North Africa. Tessler carried out some of these surveys with support from the National Science Foundation and other foundations and agencies. Other surveys are from the Arab Barometer, which Tessler co-directs, and from the World Values Survey.
Key variables in this unique database include respondent attitudes toward a wide range of political and social issues, particularly those pertaining to governance and to Islam. Also included are major political, economic, and demographic characteristics of the country of which the respondent is a citizen. The database thus permits both separate and integrated individual-level and country-level analyses.
Though not planned, Tessler’s choice to dive into opportunities as they appeared helped to create an illustrious career. He has authored, coauthored, or edited 15 books and published over 125 book chapters and journal articles. Mark Tessler is a Center for Political Studies (CPS) Researcher and Samuel J. Eldersveld Collegiate Professor of Political Science at the University of Michigan.
Dec 13, 2013 | Foreign Affairs, Innovative Methodology, International
Developed by Katie Brown in coordination with Robert Franzese
The map to the left shows Europe during World War I, including Italy and Romania. Can a graph illustrate how Italy’s decision to enter the war influenced Romania’s decision to do so?
Social scientists seek to understand social, political, and psychological phenomena. Quantitative research methods used by scientists can help investigate what factors cause specific outcomes (effects). Often, however, a factor in one unit causes an outcome in that unit, and that outcome then becomes a factor that causes outcomes in other units. Center for Political Studies (CPS) researcher and Professor of Political Science Robert Franzese, along with his coauthor and former member of CPS Jude Hays, has been studying ways to understand the relationships not just between cause and effect in one unit, but between causes and effects across multiple units, over time. That is, how to identify and estimate what is called spatial and spatiotemporal interdependence.
Franzese, along with Hays and their colleague Lena Schaeffer, presented a paper at the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association (APSA) that outlines the shortcomings of most approaches to the connection between causes and effects across multiple units over time. Then, the paper highlights some more promising models.
To illustrate how these more promising models work, let’s consider a specific application: investigating the decision of nations to enter World War I. This decision depends not only on domestic and international structural factors, but also on the decision of other nations to enter the war.
With this in mind, how did Italy’s decision to enter World War I influence Romania’s decision to do so? The below graph shows a simulation of 1,000 different possible outcomes (as dots on the graph), using Franzese’s model. From the set of simulations on the graph, we learn that when Italy joins the war (as indicated by the number of dots which appear to the right of the vertical cutoff line), Romania also joins the war 15.6% of the time (as indicated by the number of dots which appear above the horizontal cutoff line). Furthermore, when Italy does not join the war, Romania still joins the war 12.3% of the time. The difference between these two numbers – 3.3% – is thus the the impact of Italy’s decision to enter the war on Romania’s decision to enter the war.
This simulation is just one illustration of an application of spatiotemporal interdependence. Models such as these can help social scientists understand a variety of scenarios where interdependence occurs, with some of many other examples being:
- the relationship between the votes of legislators, the votes of citizens, and election results;
- the outcomes of coups, revolutions, and riots; and
- the entry of countries into treaties or alliances.
Dec 5, 2013 | CLEA, Innovative Methodology, International, National
Developed by Katie Brown and Jill Wittrock in coordination with David Backer, Allen Hicken, Kirill Kalinin, Ken Kollman, and Walter Mebane
Photo credit: Thinkstock
Voter fraud is an important problem, and it knows no geographical boundaries. In the last two months alone, allegations of voter fraud made the news. Some 1,000 citizens of Beit Shemish, Israel protested in demand of new elections amid evidence of foul play in an earlier vote. A Florida congressman’s former chief of staff was sentenced to prison for trying to rig an election. Similar stories also came out of Wisconsin, Texas, Michigan, Nebraska, Kansas, North Carolina, New York, Iowa, Egypt, Japan, and New Zealand, to name just a few from just the last few weeks.
Voter fraud is an important problem. When ballot results are viewed as corrupted by some process, elections have the potential to be destabilizing, and in extreme cases, can trigger violence and political regime change. For example, the suspicions surrounding the results of the 2007 Kenyan presidential election triggered large-scale turmoil, leading to more than 1,000 deaths. Observations from international election monitoring in 170 countries indicate 61% of countries experience some degree of cheating, including election fraud, with 27% countries in the sample exhibiting major fraud problems.
But how can we measure it? And how can we give election monitoring agencies the tools they need to pinpoint potential hotspots before an upcoming election? Researchers Walter Mebane and Kirill Kalinin at the University of Michigan have refined a set of tools that capture different aspects of potential election irregularities. Some of these methods are informed in part by techniques developed for detecting financial fraud: numbers changed by humans tend to have patterns that wouldn’t have occurred through the normal process of casting a ballot. Other methods derive from other mathematical regularities or feature simulations of what votes affected by fraud look like. Such methods have revealed fraud in recent elections in Russia, Iran, and Uganda. However, vast amounts of election returns are needed to conduct the data analysis, and many of the tests of election fraud have relied on precinct or polling station results, which can be difficult to get from governments, especially ones under suspicion of engaging in fraudulent behavior.
Enter the Constituency-Level Elections Archive (CLEA). Three of the co-directors of CLEA (Ken Kollman, Allen Hicken, and David Backer) are teaming up with Mebane and Kalinin to provide high quality and detailed constituency-level election results. Together the researchers are testing whether tools developed for detecting fraud using precinct results will also work at a higher level of aggregation, namely the district-level. CLEA provides cleaned and uniformly formatted results for elections around the world. Preliminary results from recent elections in Russia, Uganda, and Mexico suggest that different fraud detection techniques accurately estimate the probability of suspicious behavior at the district-level. For instance, in Russia, serious irregularities were widely alleged by both election monitors and Russian voters. Mebane and Kalinin found significant and substantial evidence of fraud using a range of fraud detection techniques, thus corroborating the firsthand account of monitoring organizations and Russian voters.
Next steps include applying these techniques to the remaining 1200+ elections in the archive with the end goal of providing baseline estimates of likely cases of fraud. Armed with this information, election monitoring organizations will have a sophisticated tool to complement their efforts at promoting free and fair elections. Over the short run, such results can assist monitors in focusing attention on problematic areas in specific countries, but in the long run, these detection techniques have the potential to deter those who wish to engage in election manipulation.
Nov 7, 2013 | Innovative Methodology, International
Post developed by Katie Brown in coordination with William Zimmerman.
Photo credit: Thinkstock
In recent months, many U.S. headlines have cast Russia in a negative light. With the 2014 Winter Olympics set to take place in Sochi, Russia, worries about the host country’s homophobia and racism abound. A hunger strike by one imprisoned member of the band Pussy Riot brought the harsh labor camp sentences for the political activist punk rock band back into the news. And whistleblower Edward Snowden found asylum in Russia to avoid extradition to his native United States. Amid these negative stories, Russia played an instrumental role in disarming Syria’s Assad of his chemical weapons without resorting to militaristic retaliation. This peace brokering role culminated in a Nobel peace prize for the watch dog group brought in to oversee the process.
Stories about Russia, like these examples, often focus on President Vladimir Putin. Putin has solidified his power within Russia and abroad during his reign. In fact, Forbes named him the World’s Most Powerful Person for 2013.
But how do Russian’s feel about the trajectory of their government? Center for Political Studies (CPS) Research Professor Emeritus William Zimmerman studies International Relations, with a specialty in Russia.
Over the period 1993-2012, Zimmerman has overseen a panel of six surveys of elites from Moscow – including heads of governmental departments, owners and executive officers of companies, media editors, leaders in the armed forces, and members of the legislature.
In his recent working paper – “2020 Vision: Russian elites in 2020 perspective: Political system preference and national interests” – Zimmerman considers the results of the survey as a way to map expectations of the future among Russian elites.
The three most recent surveys (in 2004, 2008, and 2012) suggest a trend among these elites toward support for Western-style democracy. Zimmerman projects that this support will continue to grow through 2020. The following table breaks down survey responses by year, illustrating the trend.
Interestingly, support for Western-style democracy is also more pronounced among younger Muscovite elites. The graph below breaks down support by birth year range (with the height of each column indicating the number of persons responding, not percentages).
Zimmerman ends with an interesting question: “Would the creation of a genuinely competitive party system – warts and all – boost support for what is after all a core element in Western political systems?” Interestingly, the paper notes that in the early years of his tenure, Putin spoke admiringly about such a system.
Oct 28, 2013 | Conflict, Current Events, Foreign Affairs, Innovative Methodology, International
Post developed by Katie Brown in coordination with Mark Tessler.
Egypt attracted international attention as a key participant in the Arab Spring. Along with Tunisia, it was among the first countries to witness the fall of a decades-long authoritarian regime. In early 2011, protestors demanded that then Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak step down. In February 2011, Mubarak relented, turning over power to the military.
Photo credit: Thinkstock
In November of 2011, the country held parliamentary elections and these were won by the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party. In June of 2012, the Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi was elected president of Egypt. Over the next year and a half, Morsi pushed remaining officials from Mubarak’s reign out of government, all the while consolidating his power.
With the economic situation deteriorating, and with conflicting claims about who was responsible, anti-Morsi protests spread throughout Egypt in summer 2013. Then, on July 3, 2013, in response to the growing unrest, the military removed Morsi from office. Violent clashes between the military and supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood followed and have continued sporadically since that time.
A key question raised by these events, and by post-Arab Spring developments in a number of other Arab countries, concerns the role to be played by Islam in government and political affairs. As expressed by Egypt’s Grand Mufti in April 2011, following the ouster of Mubarak, “Egypt’s revolution has swept away decades of authoritarian rule but it has also highlighted an issue that Egyptians will grapple with as they consolidate their democracy: the role of religion in political life.”
Center for Political Studies (CPS) Researcher and Samuel J. Eldersveld Collegiate Professor of Political Science Mark Tessler is making major strides to understand what ordinary citizens in Egypt and other Arab countries think about the complicated and contested relationship between religion and politics in the Middle East. Among the data on which Tessler is drawing is the multi-country Arab Barometer survey project, which Tessler co-directs. Arab Barometer surveys in Egypt in 2011 and 2013 offer insights about how recent events have influenced the way the Egyptian public thinks about Islam’s political role.
One finding from these surveys is that most Egyptians believe democracy and Islam to be fully compatible, and this view did not change between 2011 and 2013. On the other hand, while most Egyptians have confidence in Islam itself, there has been a dramatic decrease over this period in the proportion that believes that the country is better off when religious people hold public office. Some Egyptians describe this as wanting Islam but not Islamists.
These Arab Barometer surveys are part of a larger dataset pertaining to Islam and governance that Tessler has constructed with support from the Carnegie Corporation of New York. The dataset pulls together information from 44 nationally representative surveys conducted in 15 countries in the Middle East and North Africa and includes not only respondent political and social attitudes but also major characteristics of the country of which the respondent is a citizen.
Tessler’s analysis of these data will be published in a forthcoming book, Islam and the Search for a Political Formula: How Ordinary Citizens in the Muslim Middle East Think about Islam’s Place in Political Life. The book will offer a deeper understanding of the desired role of Islam in politics across the Middle East, a religion and region often misrepresented in American media, politics, and minds. In addition, the database will be placed in the public domain for use by other scholars who study the relationship between religion and politics.
Oct 14, 2013 | Conflict, Current Events, Foreign Affairs, International
Post developed by Katie Brown in coordination with James Morrow.
Photo credit: Thinkstock
The horror in Syria has gripped international attention, especially in recent weeks with the release of images of those killed by chemical weapons. But why would Bashar al-Assad, the President of Syria, use chemical weapons when he is winning the civil war against insurgents?
Center for Political Studies (CPS) Research Professor and A.F.K. Organski Collegiate Professor of World Politics James Morrow recently spoke to this issue on MSNBC’s The Last Word. Assad’s target was a rebel controlled neighborhood in Damascus, the capital of Syria. A large chemical attack would scare other civilians, inducing them to flee for safety. After they left, Assad could move his forces into one the few remaining rebel areas. Morrow also highlights the timing of Assad’s chemical strike: it occurred after the rebels began to lose ground across Syria. Assad used chemical weapons precisely because he is winning.
Morrow’s comments on MSNBC are grounded in his research. In a forthcoming book, Order Within Anarchy, Morrow models violations of the laws of war, like the use of chemical weapons. Violations typically come early in war. When they come later – as in Syria – violations tend to be perpetrated by the winning side. The violation itself increases the perpetrator’s chance to win the war. Thus, Assad’s deployment of chemical weapons could be seen as a coup de grâce.
Yet, Assad also faced a strong global backlash. Obama declared a red line crossed and seemed poised to order counter-attacks on Assad. Such a strike could undo any gain from the chemical weapons. But, Russia – who, with China, blocked approval to counter-attack Syria in the United Nations – proposed an alternative solution: order Assad to surrender his chemical weapons for destruction by international monitors. Obama and Assad agreed to this approach. Last week, Assad received praise for his steps to chemically disarm. And also last week the Nobel Prize committee awarded the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons with the Nobel Peace Prize for its efforts to disarm Syria. But the gains of his use of chemical weapons remain.
If you ask Mark Tessler about the trajectory of his work, he smiles. His career path was never planned; rather he took advantage of unexpected opportunities along the way. Among these was the chance to spend part of his undergraduate education as a student at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and part of his graduate education as a student at the University of Tunis.
